The network marketplace and its implications Available to Purchase

This paper has both a theoretical and a practical dimension. It provides a brief overview of developments in the area of Value Added and Data Services, then goes on to report on a recent piece of research in the field. In theoretical terms it owes much to the so‐called ‘Information Economy’ school, which embraces not just the work of Machlup and Porat and of current investigators at among other places, the universities of Newcastle and Sussex but indeed, dates back to the 1930s and to research undertaken first by Kondratieff and then Schumpeter into the links between technological change and economic growth. The research which features in this paper is concerned with the potential contribution of advanced telecommunications to regional economic development, and specifically, with the impact of a new fibre optics‐based telecommunications network on the services sector in Northern Ireland.